2012 in the hardlight of Kevin McCaffery's poems |
by Kevin McCaffery |
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...and that's just how it was in 2012, more for some, less for others, or vice-versa, but true every which way
Poems 2012 Chute My wife and son have left the house for a while, how long they'll be gone I don't know-- the house is as still as my empty mind, it takes on a shadowy glow. Ticking clock and refrigerator hum-- these are the muted sounds I hear. I have nothing to say to anyone. Funny how that becomes more clear. This basement is where I spend my time. I like it because it is cool, yet I use the hours when they are gone to climb up through the laundry chute to the drab, lived-in rooms above my pit where I can watch a little t.v. and grab myself a beer, a snack, some chips-- feeling remnants of memories. They flicker by, these memories--they glow like particles of dust in light. I can become transfixed by every mote, dwell in diminishing delight until my son and wife come bickering home, then I descend, leaving scant trace that I have pushed aside the spectral stone once more to take my rightful place. Sometimes they pause by the basement door and gaze into the blackness here, but both are reluctant to come below to see who might have moved the chair in the living room so slightly, or switched the often broken toaster on. Though there is no thief where there is no theft, they are wary of my return. I'll stay away from dallying It is like being half way from the summer house to the winter house and remembering you've left the bongo drums behind and, thinking yourself unwatched, throwing a little fit, stomping and grouching and then sensing the dispassionate observer in the corner of the enclosure and feeling the embarrassment of being seen, at least that is what some say it's like, so I'll stay away from such activities for now in the same way I avoid other things, but when the all-clear sounds, please stand aside, Plotinus, I'll be on hand in an instant with all my capabilities, fully slathered in unguents and perfumes-- I'll be a walking flower to be there to savor such frolicsome dallying when I hear that supergreen signal sound. The easy way (Arrange me any way you like and the effect will be the same) Your fantasies will not only come to nothing but will play a part in drawing you from what was to be the far easier fate that would have lain in wait for you, a fate that was machine-milled and-- while not glimmering, for the finish was muted intentionally-- inspected by elves who shook, prodded, bent, and probed it according to procedures set out in the Trilogy itself and so I take it very seriously that you, flushed with one victory, rush to replace what was to be with what won't work out so well. Was it an unconscious impulse driving your Volvo towards the house where your ex still lives? Or was it hubris? You imagined yourself a modern Mars? Or better yet, the influence of dour Lautremont (who'll take a cub and rearrange its spots) drew you to automatize your actions as if you had no will, which you did, prompting feelings, recriminations, screams and tears. Your fantasies are not your friends. Whether in death or life or at toil or play, whether here in Houston or in the hills, brown now, whether chased or giving chase, let it be easy. And the easiest way is when you identify your fate and follow it like a shadow, a shadow which never has had or will have a bad day, for who's heard of an unwilling or unhappy shadow? Whether hard or soft, remunerated or impecunious, whether electrified or powerless--the system's down now-- whether chirpy, voiceless, informed, choiceless, whether simple like Sunday morning, early, or as convoluted as any drudging day at work in an office of trolls, why not let it be easy? A rest stop for moles Muse, please stop harrying me-- I am pretending as best I can that the place I work is not some tepidly surreal Hades, but still you buffet me with idiocies... it's becoming harder to nod and smile as if I work in a crucial vending machine doing important things--which I don't, which you know, exacting Muse. I play a role in dispensing candy to the moles who happen to be tunneling nearby and take a break for something sweet. It's not even good candy. Today you used your awesome power to make me chair of a committee to study planting our machine six-feet deep. Would it increase business? The relocation committee will study this and if you thought about it, Muse, you'd know our motto is "excavation, excavation, excavation." I almost died when I suggested that even though all the committee members laughed. And I know that you're trying to make me quit my job so I can write better poems for you, but, Muse, that I can't do unless you absolutely break my life it two. Give it more effort, hallucinogenic Goddess, or leave me alone. Why can't you just accept my mediocre output? I do. I'm just a tiny fellow in a vending machine. Anapestic approach in demand for this task The unending unfolding of dastardly plots, intermixed with ineptitude, malice, and lust-- all the worst of the qualities making the men of this region incredibly loathsome--result at the end of the story in nothing. A book on this place, not yet written, but covering all that's transpired would require an infinity (more, while it's hard to imagine) of words; and the need for repeat situations, recurring unchecked, all involving unsavory characters, (men in whom duty, endurance, civility, strength of conviction and other respectable traits, don't exist), for recyclings of similar themes-- as a clock through all time will revisit its hours-- and for patterns whose skew is more vapid than bad would necessitate prose so devoid of élan an unsteeled and undisciplined chronicler'd die in attempting the narrative. Listlessness rules. And while Fate has decreed that this land has had zilch to impart in the general scheme of such things, somehow I, having tenuous ties to this place through ancestors imagined or real, am to find the authorial voice, who, undaunted by deep exploration of wearisome evil, is set to unveil this mundane, unforgivable land to the world. As to how this dispatches me here to your door, that's the question. Your faculty, ma'am, for endurance is clear in considering what you've produced. You alone can present the account through circuitous weavings of falsehood and fact. Compensation is bountiful though you must use the contorted approach we employ in our speech: anapestic throughout. In this way we'll produce understanding, though subtle, of why we exist. We're a people both dull and malignantly glib. Attempting to Know Everything while Hating McGee If attempting to know everything (while hating McGee) is like trying to know nothing then put me down for that approach and I'll clear my mind like agriculturalists tidy a field, scything and pulling until the ground is brown, see? But if that doesn't work, why then I'll drop napalm, God's finest elixir, to burn my thoughts right down to gravy nothings, my mellow harshed to the maximum-- gone, prettified, wan poser whose game is wack like this incessant rain, powerfully invisible from nothing clouds, the drops checking every checkbox-- some answers must be right-- so you can't even see the mud or where it was. Still, abruptly knowledge comes that tasks have been left undone by the universe: One thing is that it has not waterproofed all the shoes it should have, so a lot of us, deluged, will get seriously wet feet if we go out, though only upstarts depart the ark. So what else has Mr. Universe left undone? He has left you alive, McGee. It's hard for me to even think about knowing nothing when I know that. I killed my fate My fate and I walked side by side; it was my shadow, though never spied. Sometimes it followed, sometimes it led, unseen companion from birth to death. I did not know that it was there, so quiet my fate was, transparent, clear, yet it drove my existence from bad to worse; I did not know my life was cursed. The voice in my mind whispering advice, to do this or that when I faced a choice-- that was my fate, steering me wrong. I could not resist it. How strong! How strong! Who was it showed me I was in thrall to a baleful deceiver, the tunes he called? It was you, child, your second sight showed me my fate, grim parasite. You taught me to see it, this fevered ghost-- it was a fluke worm and I the host. You taught me to kill it, drive it away, using your love, dear, I killed my fate. Now I am boundless. Now I am free. No furtive voices whisper to me. What will my life hold, now that I am unchained? Where will I go now that I'm unconstrained? Untied, unfettered, I've made a new start. I've slain the slick serpent that circled my heart. False hates and fears I have escaped, with your sweet love, girl, I killed my fate. Dinner with dad "What does the coyote want to do with his life?" Isabel Schimmers, Conquering the Bad Lands with Magic It was the usual dinner with the usual questions but when my daughter's new boyfriend told me that, after college, he wanted to become a life coach--a fucking consultant--to wild animals, I had to restrain myself from getting up wordlessly and walking out. I could see my daughter's wariness, watching me, watching him, for familiar signs that something was going to go down like those unavoidable days when the material and mystical worlds rearrange themselves in their hallucinated game of musical spheres. But I stayed on, molding my face into a grimace-free visage, bidding my passions to heel like dogs, and asked this young Lothario how he'd do what hadn't been done before, at least so far as I remembered, excepting for the sake of argument Orpheus and Francis of Assisi as being the only two I knew who'd done some similar shit with animals and such. He countered with a life-strategy of writing his own job description, following his bliss, and maybe interning at a zoo or Sea World and then trekking into the wild like that dude in the movie..."where his ass starved in the end?" I butted in and he looked confused, then smiled, meek, nodding yes, until my daughter, sleek, moved in to rescue him like she'd rescued me countless times before in the bad old days, so I relented and the dinner moved on and became just fine, I mean as fine as these awkward dinners can go. Fool's awakening You'd spent the whole day trying to write a really fine punk song about whether flowers think or not, but, hampered, you'd drunk a lot, you met with periods of unclear mentation, so you took some drugs in your fustian frustration and lost yourself entirely in the Arnold Arboretum, conking out. Angelic hosts, you were en route to see 'em, when you evacuated all, using every fleshly avenue. Let's give a shout out to life-saving puke, sweat, shit, snot, and drool. Piss too! You awoke around dawn, befouled and bedewed, yet, sagacious owl, or maybe more wood-weasel's friend, you perceived proximate a stagnant pond and waded in to remove what you could better do without. So, peaceful feelings, serene warm dawn, until a ranger's shouts chased you back to your squalid punk rock prison, ancient, dripping infant: botched baptism. Lovett and his donkeys "Although I looked down from high above, I saw clearly the round, earthbank-enclosed corral filled with many donkeys surrounding my friend Lovett who, wearing a cowboy hat, was pressed upon on all sides by the donkeys." Isabel Schimmers, Conquering the Bad Lands with Magic After I joined the charlatans' circle, I saw exactly why the cake was half-baked and why the fat lady would never set foot on the stage of the situation so that like, presumably, life itself, it would unwind as a roll of sheet music-- given an effectively imagined mechanism-- for one of those endless, unlistenable operas by one of those American maximalist composers even though, speaking truth to power, I might expire before any chance of hearing the grand finale (just as audience members often outright die enduring Einstein on the Beach), yet the group told me there might be some solace in exploring the shifting spaces between wakefulness and sleep, so I gave it the old necromantic try and I'll make some observations, the first of which is watch out: when you point your broomstick towards those wastes beyond the dunes, the sky, and the horizon and fly for weeks in the frosty air then almost any breeze or snatch of song can carry you to wistful places, haunted places, like that from which Lovett returned oblivious, transformed, to promote a show called "Donkeys Make the Man" and had six episodes in the can and it was already sold to a network after a bidding war-- and while this was admittedly a rare-cooked shank, I was not in any way impressed by it. I could see that he'd psychically left the circle and I started to distance myself from him. Faculty Show satire One thing I'd do if I could start a college is ban from use a plethora of terms: and I might start with "expansion of knowledge" --the more it's said the less our students learn; next on my list is "leadership," uttered most by those who cannot lead in relation to followers or those who wander lost. Add "shifting paradigms," "globalization," "reframing," "monetizing," "transparency," and all the terms our corporate cousins spew. When terms themselves acquire such currency, who are we not to speak them loudly too? And then there are the flea words, irritants that swarm through conversations: "nimble," "bold," "agile"…I would against this pestilence dispense insecticide; and I would scold especially all speakers of hyperbole, were I the chief of my imagined school. And we will not forget "diversity," of these pernicious words the crown jewel, that, taking envy as its core belief-- to calibrate, not "celebrate," "difference"-- must make the many hate the few. At least something comes of all this belligerence-- it has created vast bureaucracies which my newly founded college will eschew. All funds will go instead to libraries, labs, and classes in which all we'll do is learn as much as we can fairly stand-- that alone will be our occupation. In truth, there will be little else on hand. No climbing walls will furnish relaxation, no spacious dorms like luxury hotels, no chefs concocting meals to make one drool-- so most will think my school a boring hell except those who deem tomes and bowls of gruel required ingredients of perfection. And calm will mark the campus halls as will the silent slowness of deep reflection, for mental triumphs are not noisy thrills in general. But one last word to ban before we end this planning exercise-- I would with pleasure pay a hatchet man to hack one term from parlance, to excise "excellence" from our terminology. Applied so frequently to average things, excellence has stooped to mediocrity-- a bogus claim, useless, without meaning. Busy with doing what we think is best, we won't spend too much time on celebration of ourselves, or branding, rankings, and the rest. Our motto is sagacious rumination. And if that motto won't bring in students, if the campus would be cavernous and bare, then my goal is lofty, though imprudent: to be the plainest at the college fair. Echoing Anthony Braxton's question Where is the jazz in Anthony Braxton's Composition 98? Is it hiding behind a bush, an elf, supporting books, a shelf, a pile of pelts, pelf, a secret between two against one, stealth, in quiet breathing, health, or within the core of being, self? I play. Whether it is me or Anthony Braxton the neighbors can hardly tell. I play so badly, he so swells the jazz goes hiding in between his notes, semi-floating like a fleet of sinking boats. When the moon is hiding in the clouds, then he is playing loud. When a swimmer holds something obscure aloft, then he is playing soft. When a school of fish enters the sinking boats, he is playing infrequent notes. And, if one played Anthony Braxton's Composition 98 at a pool party of beautiful people, their pets, and some squirrels, well the spring rain accomplishes the same thing falling into and around the pool, but I'm in my office working, looking out the window at people getting up and running. They're unhappy and I wander out, now that there is less opportunity for sunning, noting it's wonderful the way rain makes the pool look, but there are no plants in the pool. There are plants in a pond, take Walden Pond as an example, where Thoreau lived in a shack and thought. I never read him. You have? And what is more, you've thought about his thought, but I am thinking about my boy, Aidan, three, and the way he threw handfuls of dirt into Walden Pond, water chilly that day, May 14, saying, "This will make the pond warmer." Too bad he did not have a backhoe. My feet were cold. Quasi non-existence through psychic fusion with an experience I seek an experience so pure and powerful that it will render me invisible in that I will become that experience completely (through psychic fusion or other mechanism difficult to explain using our words) and disappear with it into the shaded past as it disappears--except perhaps from memory; in that case, I will be remembered, though not for long. Or in the case of fusion with an ongoing experience-- one of expansive if not infinite duration, then, though I will still exist, it will be as though I've disappeared. I'll be subsumed into something else. For the sake of argument I won't be here. I'll be French or something. So today I plan to spend the hours imagining the things with which I could conjoin. Something fleeting as an April shower or longer lasting: the hardness of a concrete tower; a concept like hyperrealism or a belief, theosophy, and I, though practically nothing, will be both gone and present virtually for quite some time, though really what I'm thinking about can't be done and while you won't hesitate to tell me throughout the shoddy afternoon hours that I'm still here, I won't be able to resist reminding you that you don't exist either-- my imaginary critic, my posited Charles Simic-- since you chose to leave this ranch long ago to go mining silver ore in the drab hills of a fabricated Ecuador where, according to some reports, you became one with the silver sparkling under the earth. Anyway, I never heard from you again. Stupid days Walking up through the foothills of the Range, heading towards your "rustic cottage," a copy of that book in my knapsack, a smell rising up from the swamp spreading like non-profit organizations through a late-stage industrial society where diversity and sameness have coalesced as in this non-descript wood. I wish I still smoked. Gone are the days of drugs and alcohol and staying up all night breaking down back doors to the wrong buildings--your idea; gone too are screaming and yelling, self-loathing and despair. Gone the days of feeding dreamy cupcakes to narcoleptic youths. Gone are the "sheepishly beautiful cats" who sat--present, but distant--by the forged Suprematist painting in the Menehune Club. Remember how, giggling, you told them I was "the spin doctor for the Tao" over and over until they got up and left? I miss those incandescently stupid days. Robot Sorry I have been quiet today, but you know how I am. When I don't know what to do I do nothing, just spending time playing mind games with you, friend, throughout the languid afternoon until the long-awaited buzz of the evening news and the two of us turn to this something to do, to this not that much but still something. The world is out there just where it should be. The mechanical wistfulness of your companionship tantalizes me, yet I am not without self-doubt. What is my life? Put on the music and get the cards, Robot. Tonight is the night we play for keeps. The sister I never had for Lesleigh Brisson She is the sister I never had, so it may sound weird to say I married her… incestuous almost…but it is not like that, though actually if we had been kin, foals of the same mare, to employ your country terms, I would have married her anyway, defying all convention, ripping up the prohibition as Aldous dismissed the covenant in the last act of our national play, our epic, my backwoods friends. So how would things be different if we two were "whoopee twins" or "lustangs" to use again your rural phrases? I wouldn't say she is the sister I never had, for one thing. I'd be more circumspect. The priest melts down If believing there is no god fulfilled like believing there is, then my soul, if I had one, would be calmer, more pacific. To nothing I could pray and draw solace from it; I'd be a pious man, or a priest, in this new church, telling my flock nothing forgives your many sins, and no one cares about your pains--and if people were consoled by that, emboldened, braced, then how much would it matter whether there is a god or not? Not that it seems to matter anyway. Even if you think there is nothing out there, no cosmic force, no ray of light that launched all this for love is it good to pray, to pretend that things are different? I've tried it. For a moment I may feel intense sensations--see, feel and hear things enriching, sweet, surpassing fair, but giving prayer a chance does not mean there is much chance for prayer. That's what I've found, after preaching for a lifetime from this pulpit. I've come to know mine is a creed that has nothing going for it. What urges me to share these thoughts-- courage or something worse? We'll see. If unbelief can sustain faith, my sheep, you will still follow me. A universe without meaning holds one sure thing, one certainty: though mistrust me for the liar I am, this truth won't set you free. Mechanical Nostradamus on New Year's Eve In humor a new era starts, a cosmic joke, the kind of laugh the devil has, a sacrifice, a curse, as when your robot slave brought you a cup of tap, not bottled, water and you required he drink it down to punish his dysfunction. Since his maker gave him no mouth, he could but pour the water on himself, honoring your injunction. But that was just another snag for us, and so we'll leave it behind, pre-processing what looms ahead, a final chapter to this Age of Iron. We will make a joke-- a robot-monkey fusion wearing bell-bottomed jeans--of this new year. In the year 2013 our metal selves will hum--coal-stoked!-- our algorithms will be pristine. With humor this new era starts, rebooting with a robot's laugh. Though we'll have no use for human sense in the soft logic of our mirth, so little use for human sense, as we ungag a laughing earth. Let our metallic flagons clink-- imagined drinks! We'll learn to laugh. |
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